DrBacchus' Journal

This morning, I was listening to Dan O'Brien's talk at OSCon about evil.. Highly recommended listening, and *very* funny. One of the things he talked about was the quote by Mohandas Ghandi (or was it Eric Raymond?)

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

So, in that light, we have Bill Gates laughing at MIT's $100 laptop project

"If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type," Gates said.

This is great news on many fronts. It demonstrates that Mr. Gates is frightened by the prospect, and, of course, since clever platitudes are always true, it proves that MIT will eventually "win" in some sense, with universally available cheap computer hardware. Yay, MIT.

I need a cup of coffee I'll feel better

Name that quote. And no fair using the internet.

Very hard getting up this morning, and I'm not sure why. I wasn't up terribly late, but I really had to get DNS working. Here's a tip. When you update zone files on the wrong DNS server, they don't propagate. A few months ago, I started migrating services off of my aging server onto a less-aging server, and forwarding ports at the router. I keep forgetting that I did that, and updating zone files on the old server. Unfortunately, this time around, it took me about 2 hours to figure that out, rather than the regular 10 minutes. I've replaced the named.reload script with a shell script that prints "Hey, genius, it's on the other server now!" That should help.

I'm working hard to pay the rent
And support my government
...
You can laugh but it's no joke
And you can't get blood from a stone

Hooters- Nervous Night: Can't get blood from a stone

Last night I watched Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. I got two boxes of DVDs for Christmas - one of old westerns, and the other of old "Science Fiction" movies, although at least half of these latter are rather spuriously classified as such. The Martians capture Santa Claus, because they want their kids to be happy. With a plot premise like that, it almost *has* to be a great movie.

"You can't dismiss the wisdom of centuries."
"I can!"

When the sun goes down and it's getting late
You say it's time for bed
She just takes her time
Acting like she never heard a word you said

Little baby wanna hold you tight
She don't ever wanna say good night
She's a lover, she wanna be daddy's girl

When the morning comes
And it's time to go start another day
She won't let you leave, and she does her best
To try to make you stay

Pretty baby gonna start to cry
She don't ever wanna say good bye
She's a lover, she wanna be Daddy's Girl

(Daddy's Girl, Peter Cetera)

Yeah, it's sappy. What can I say? My daughter is wonderful.